It is known to monitor operation of road vehicles to provide data for assessing the insurance risk presented by a driver of the vehicle. This can be achieved by fitting dedicated monitoring equipment to a vehicle, often referred to as a “black box”. This equipment typically comprises a positioning system (such as GPS) to determine the speed and location of the vehicle, an accelerometer or other motion sensor(s), a memory for recording vehicle operating data and/or a transmitter arranged to transmit vehicle operating data via a wireless (e.g. cellular) network to a server where it can be used by an insurer of the vehicle. Providing and installing this equipment is relatively costly.
As an alternative, it has been recognised that many smartphones comprise at least some of the hardware useful for monitoring operation of a vehicle and transmitting operating data for use by an insurer. Thus, a driver's smartphone can be employed either alone or together with equipment installed in a vehicle to monitor operation of a vehicle and thus reduce or eliminate the cost of equipping a vehicle with monitoring equipment. A further advantage of this approach is that a smartphone serves to identify the driver.
However, existing such systems present a number of problems.
Where a smartphone is used on its own to monitor vehicle operation it is necessary for the driver to initiate monitoring at the beginning of a journey and cease monitoring at the end of the journey. The driver may simply forget to do this. Alternatively the smartphone can be configured to detect that a journey has commenced, by monitoring movement of the smartphone and recognising characteristics of a journey in a road vehicle. In this case, though, the smartphone will recognize journeys where the owner is not the driver, such as when the driver is a passenger in a motor car or taking public transport and thus record data for those journeys which is not relevant for assessing the driver's insurance risk. To overcome this it is necessary for the driver to provide some manual input to verify whether or not they are driving the insured vehicle for each monitored journey. This can be time consuming and irritating to the driver and, if overlooked, can lead to incorrect data being recorded. Also, the need for the smartphone to continually monitor movement and detect when its user is making a road journey results in a significant processing and power consumption overhead, leading to a reduced battery life. This may encourage a user to disable the monitoring function to save power, resulting in incomplete collection of data.
The present embodiments have been made in consideration of these problems.
It is an object of embodiments of the invention to provide apparatus and methods for monitoring vehicle operation using a personal mobile electronic device which minimize, cost, power consumption and the need for user intervention. These apparatus and methods may be used for monitoring driver behaviour to help assess insurance risk or for other purposes such as management of fleets of vehicles, particularly with a view to assessing driver safety.